Up the Hill and Over

by Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

"Oh, thanks, Miss Philps. There are some hooks I cannot manage. But mother will probably need a lot of help. I thought you were with her now."

"No. She has not yet sent for me." Miss Philps drew out her watch and consulted it. "Dear me!" with slight surprise, "it is much later than I thought. Perhaps I had better go up."

Esther looked worried. "I believe you had—if she hurries at the last she will be terribly excited. Aunt Amy told me she wished particularly not to be disturbed this morning, but surely she has forgotten how late it is getting."

"I'll go up," said Miss Philps. "It's time for her tonic anyway, and we must persuade her to eat something. When you are ready for me to hook your dress, call. I can easily manage you both."

This is all that Mrs. Sykes heard, for just then Jane flew by again like a returning comet and had to be captured and properly tied up. Mrs. Sykes, as she admitted herself, was no hand at fancy fixings but she was painstaking and conscientious and the bow-tying absorbed all her energies. She was getting on very well and had almost succeeded in adjusting the last bow when a cry from the room above startled her into the tying of a double knot.

"What was that?"

It was not a loud cry—but there was something in it which brought Mrs. Sykes' heart leaping into her throat, which sent Esther reeling against the stair baluster, which brought the doctor, white-faced from the veranda—it was the kind of cry which carries in its note the psychic essence of terror and disaster.

Mrs. Sykes for all her iron nerve felt suddenly faint. Jane began to cry. The doctor and Esther had raced up the stairs. But there was no repetition of the cry. Instead there was silence. Then a murmur of voices and sounds of ordered activity overhead.

Clearly something had happened. But what? Mrs. Sykes wanted very much to go and see. But the glimpse she had caught of Callandar's eyes as he sprang to the stair, the look of white horror in Esther's face as she followed him, and above all, that strange terrifying Something in the cry she had heard seemed to discourage enquiry. The good lady turned her attention to the comforting of Jane. After all, if she waited long enough she could hardly help hearing all about it. At first hand, too.

It seemed a long time that she waited. Miss Philps came up and down the stairs several times but she did not appear to see Mrs. Sykes. Jane stopped crying and wandered out into the garden. Still Mrs. Sykes waited and presently Aunt Amy came in, looking quite excited and asked eagerly what time it was. Mrs. Sykes told her, adding with asperity that these were fine goings-on, and that they'd all be late for the wedding if they didn't hurry up.